The Whale
There was a big whale stranding out here the other day, something like 40 pilot whales up and down Farewell Spit. A new friend, an animal behaviourist, explained it to me.
“Pilot whales are incredibly social; as soon as one strands, they all strand. The matriarch will go to help, and they all follow the matriarch.”
My partner and I went out to a beach near the Spit a few days after, and on the way home we stopped off. As far as we knew the stranding was over, the whales had died on the shore and been removed. Not a single one had survived; a handful had been refloated but threw themselves back on the shore hours later. Beyond that I assumed they’d been taken already – whales are taonga, and local iwi have rights to the bodies of any strandings.
We walked out on the inland side of the Spit, the calm side, where the dunes slump down into an estuary that seems to run all the way out to the dark, blue-grey mountains across the bay, with the sea only a thin silver strip between the iron sand and the folded, mounded bruise of hills in the distance at low tide. Dozens of black swans peppered that expanse, waddling unhurriedly over the wet sand, pausing from time to time to rummage through the wrack for food. The sky was overcast; that autumn was stiflingly hot and bright to begin, then stiflingly muggy and wet. This day fell right between the two, and was blessedly cool and fresh.
To the left was rotting sea-grass, mounded up over driftwood at the high tide line, overhung with rough tussocks and gnarled karamu, glossy-leafed and spattered with tiny orange fruit. Beyond that, the ruin of a pine plantation spread over the shaggy grasses. Stumps angled wildly out of the broken soil, torn branches lay in mounds, and a slow resurgence of pioneer species breaking through the rubble. Out on the right was the wide sand, and ahead the huge dunes of the Spit became visible.
We walked for a while, heads down, laughing and talking together, enjoying the moment and the place. At some point we looked up, and stopped. There was a still, dark, rounded shape ahead and to the left on the sand. We stood for a few heartbeats, a few shallow breaths, both unsure what to do, before starting to tread tentatively toward the shape.
The whale was two or three times as long as me, black, all soft curves with no hard edges, and at first impression very still. My stomach dropped when I saw their eye – bloody, it appeared to be darting about, jerking from side to side in panic.
“Oh fuck,” I thought, “I’m going to have to try to kill them.”
My mind jumped to killing rather than refloating not because of the impossibility of dragging a whale hundreds of meters to the sea, but because of the ragged, gaping bullet wound between the eye and the blowhole. I had heard that the whales who couldn’t be refloated had been euthanised, but hadn’t considered what that meant in practical terms. I assumed the whale had survived a botched mercy killing and was in agony. I looked again, and realised that their eye had actually shattered – what I had thought was their eye was a bloody bubble dancing perversely in the wind.
We stood there like wraiths above the one real thing in the world.
Neither of us spoke, but our mood seemed to change slowly from blank, non-participatory shock to a kind of curious grief. We began to become more deeply involved with the whale, crouching by their still body, observing the slow drip of oily blood from their wound and how it pooled and sank into the brutally dark, cold sand. Eventually we began to touch them. Their black skin was incredibly smooth, and initially unyielding, but if you pressed firmly enough you could feel the give of their body. Their wound revealed the thick, pale layer of fat that had kept them warm in the cold ocean. Other signs emerged of their experiences, completely alien to me. While the skin of their head was perfectly smooth, their side was scarred and hurt. Some of this seemed recent, a wide, raw area of skin full of coarse sand, but there was so much scarring all down their side that was well healed. I have no idea of the strange fights, rituals of connection, or intensities of experience that produced those signs on the huge, fragile body, but it seemed deeply sad that all those mysteries found their end at the end of a rifle, away from their family, trapped on the sand.
The flies were already doing their work of dispersing, little agents of annihilation by which the complex events that we feel to be an individual are broken apart and returned to the flux of things.
It’s strange, I felt so sure that something needed to be done to mark this, on a personal level and, although I can’t figure the right language for this, on a spiritual one. The death of this whale deserved grief, inspired mourning, called for contemplation and quiet. Sitting with the whale a clear picture emerged in my head. I needed to make a fire and sit with them overnight. Dusk was already sliding down the beach and the thinking couldn’t be done quickly. Meanwhile I had a clear sense that the whale ought to be sat with, that it was wrong to leave them alone on the cold beach through another lengthening night. I knew I had to stop talking for a while too. Something in me knew that could work to give me the space to think about what I had seen, and was seeing, and it could help to get across to people I was around the grief we owed to other lives, the wider community we’re socialised to ignore.
I didn’t make a fire, and I didn’t stop talking. We left, thinking slowly between ourselves about what we’d seen, as other figures emerged along the beach. A woman pacing briskly along in a hot pink hoodie and exercise leggings broke up a lot of the quiet of the place. We sat in our van in the otherwise-empty carpark for a good half-hour, thinking and talking very gently and by starts. Every possible response began to feel performative, pretentious, and empty outside the moment. Although the moment itself, and the whale, were still central figures in my universe, I could no longer relate to them in a way that felt sincere. I felt hollowed-out, and like I wasted a precious chance at doing something sincere.
As we drove out, we had another few words.
“We aren’t literate in grief,” I said. My partner replied.
“And we don’t have time for ritual.”
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Twm Gwynne
Twm Gwynne is an eco-radical poet and writer, wandering child of misted valleys. More of his writing can be found at his blog ydyngwyrdd.wordpress.com.